A GIFT of a teddy bear for a little girl landed a paedophile back behind bars on Monday.

Lee Gaynor, a former Ellesmere Port man, is the subject of a sex offenders' order with stringent conditions, including a ban on being in domestic premises when a child is present.

Liverpool Crown Court heard 67-year-old Gaynor called at the home of an acquaintance on June 5 after accidentally locking himself out of his flat.

The person invited him in and rang the landlord for him to get a spare key.

Just before Gaynor arrived, the man had finished bathing his five-year-old daughter, who was playing naked on the living room floor, said Robert Dudley, prosecuting.

Gaynor did not touch or talk to the child during his 15-minute stay but returned two days later and gave the father a small brown teddy bear for the girl, whom he described as beautiful. Social services found out what had happened and contacted the police.

Gaynor, of Market Street, Birkenhead, was arrested and when questioned said he had no sexual intentions towards the child. He pleaded guilty to breaching the sex offenders' order.

The court heard that the man, a divorcee who had his daughter that weekend on an access visit, has moved home because of the incident.

Jailing Gaynor for 18 months, Judge Bryn Holloway said he had also jailed him for five years in 1999, reduced on appeal to three years, for outraging public decency.

The judge said: 'You have the most appalling record for sexually abusing young children that it has ever been my misfortune in 30 years as a barrister and as a judge to read.'

He said the conditions of the order, which Gaynor had already breached on an earlier occasion, had been made clear to him. He could not spend time in the company of children.

The encounter with the child may have been by chance but, two days later, he returned with a present for her.

'Bearing in mind your general background, that second visit is potentially a most aggravating circumstance,' said the judge. 'With your background, any act has to be interpreted as being an act in furtherance of the sort of behaviour you have indulged in for years and years.'

Judge Holloway said Gaynor was jailed for three months in August 2002 for breaching the order, just two months after it was made, by entering an alley. Some of his previous seven child sex convictions involved enticing children into alleys.

Steven Swift, defending, said Gaynor had not known the child was in the flat when he called round after being locked out. He returned two days later with the teddy bear, which he had found, as an act of thanks for the man's kindness in helping him.